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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/29056902">Hotheaded: The Tragedy of Silene Oliveira</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndraB74/pseuds/AndraB74'>AndraB74</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>La casa de papel | Money Heist (TV)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst, Backstory, Bank Robbery, Cancer, Canon-Typical Violence, Character Study, Female Friendship, Feminist Themes, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Growing Up, Guilt, Mother-Daughter Relationship</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2021-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2021-01-29</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-13 07:40:12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,266</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/29056902</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/AndraB74/pseuds/AndraB74</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Silene wasn’t a bitch, and she wasn’t an idiot. She was hurt, and she was scared, and she was complicated, and she was also hot – and that confused people, and it upset them.  People don’t like it when attractive women are messy and complicated and angry and bitter, and not in a sexy, dance-in-your-underwear kind of way, but in a hopeless, lost, desperate kind of way.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Rio | Aníbal Cortés/Tokyo | Silene Oliveira, Tokyo | Silene Oliveira/Original Male Character(s)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>9</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Hotheaded: The Tragedy of Silene Oliveira</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is my ode to Tokyo, a character who gets a lot of hate in this fandom, because I wanted to dive into her backstory and her psyche and find the beauty in her broken mess of a character. Look out for some potentially unpopular critiques of other characters in the series and some liberal breaking of the fourth wall…</p><p>Let me know if you like this, as it sort of just poured out of me and I’m honestly not even totally sure what it is; it’s a bit different from anything else I’ve written. But if people like it, I’m considering writing similar sketches on some of the other characters as well.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Silene grew up in a small house at the bottom of a hilly street, a house that the wind never seemed to reach. The air was still there – warm and thick in summer, cold and clear in winter, but always still. Her mother moved slowly, deliberately, working long hours in a factory to support the daughter she’d never intended to have. She folded each piece of laundry as if it were a priceless silk – with delicate precision and care. Silene watched, wondering at the crisp edges, so perfect and neat.</p><p>Sometimes Silene wished she could fold so perfectly, and neatly, with such patience and care. Other times she felt sad for her mother, that her world was so small that such a thing seemed to matter.</p><p>Silene didn’t have a father. Perhaps this left a permanent imprint on her psyche. Perhaps it didn’t. Perhaps it didn’t matter. She loved her mother, and her mother loved her, and that was enough for both of them.</p><p>When Silene was eight, Manuel Garrido from across the street told her she couldn’t ride bikes with him and Paco anymore because she was a girl and “couldn’t keep up.” Annoyed, Silene challenged them to a race. As they rounded the top of the big hill on their street, the two boys instinctively rolled onto their brakes. But Silene just pedaled harder. She sped down the hill, the wind rushing against her face, and for a brief moment in time, Silene was pure motion – her heart pounded, her arms tensed, but her face widened into a smile.</p><p>Silene crashed at the bottom of the hill and broke her left arm and her collarbone. But she won the race.</p><p>Manuel and Paco still didn’t let her ride bikes with them.</p><p>“It’s not fair,” she told her mother, who had to leave work to drive her daughter to the emergency room.</p><p>Her mother sighed. “Life’s not fair, cariño.”</p><p>**</p><p>Silene was never a star student, but she was a voracious reader. She read whatever she could get her hands on – novels, comic books, even reference books from the school library. Reading transported her to other places, removed the bounds of time and place from her existence. When she read, she could be still, and yet her mind was moving in a million different directions.</p><p>Manuel called her a nerd and made fun of her for carrying books with her to school everyday. Sometimes he stole her books and ran away with them, forcing her to chase him and try to wrench her books away from him.</p><p>“It’s because he likes you,” her teacher told her when she finally complained about it one day.</p><p>Silene found this response tremendously unsatisfying.</p><p>**</p><p>Things changed for Silene the year she turned thirteen. She still liked riding bikes and reading comic books, but suddenly Manuel and Paco started being strangely nice to her. The girls at school, on the other hand, suddenly started talking about her behind her back, though they often failed to hide their whispers and sneers.</p><p>Silene cut her hair short and started wearing baggy t-shirts. This seemed to help. Everyone went back to ignoring her.</p><p>**</p><p>Silene started waiting tables when she was sixteen. Her mother said she could keep the money she earned for herself, but after Silene saw her mother sorting through bills late one night with her head in her hands, she started discreetly slipping her earnings into her mother’s purse. Her mother must have noticed, but she never said a word.</p><p>Silene didn’t mind the work. It kept her busy. The café bustled and she buzzed from table to table, setting out drinks and tapas. She didn’t particularly care for it when the male patrons called her <em>se</em><em>ñorita</em> and <em>princesa</em> and <em>bonita</em>, but she started to learn that when she just smiled and played along, they left larger tips.</p><p>They also left larger tips when she wore a bit of lipstick and a low-cut shirt.</p><p>“It’s not fair,” her coworker Luis complained when she tucked another twenty euro note into her pocket.</p><p>Silene shrugged. “Life’s not fair.”</p><p>**</p><p>Silene was seventeen when she met Rafa. He had come into the café to watch a football match. He ordered a beer and said thank you when she brought it. He smiled at her, but it didn’t feel like it usually did when men smiled at her. It was a real smile, not a leer. He left his number on the receipt with a note to text him if she ever wanted to get a coffee.</p><p>Silene was wary at first. But there was something about Rafa that completely disarmed her. He was so open, so steady, so relaxed. He was a dock, still and unmoving as the waves crashed around it. He tapped into something in her, something raw and vulnerable, and he made it feel safe and understood. He had strong arms and broad shoulders and a muscled chest and soft, soft eyes. Silene found a home in those eyes, between those arms.</p><p>He was nineteen at the time, a mechanic-in-training with dreams of being a musician. Silene was the practical one. She knew there was little chance of her ever working anything other than a service job. She didn’t have the grades (or the money) for university, and with unemployment what it was, she was just glad to be working.</p><p>Rafa was her first for many things, but the most important one was that he was her first love.</p><p>**</p><p>Silene was nineteen the day that she came home from her job at the café and found her mother sitting at the kitchen table with a cold cup of coffee in front of her.</p><p>“Sit down, cariño,” her mother told her heavily.</p><p>That’s when she told Silene about the breast cancer.</p><p>Silene felt the room sway. She felt blood rush away from her head.</p><p>She should have been there for her mother in that moment, should have said something loving and gentle, should have made her mother a new coffee and given her a hug and told her “we’ll get though this together” or something similarly empty but well-intentioned.</p><p>But everything inside Silene was screaming, so instead, she sat still, staring, immobilized by the weight of it all.</p><p>**</p><p>Her mother had to leave her job at the factory once the chemo started.</p><p>Silene started picking up extra shifts at the café, but that could only get them so far. The bills stacked up, and the money never seemed to stretch far enough. Silene met with the bank to talk about the mortgage on their home. The bank officer explained the relief and deferral options. The words flew by Silene, spinning and twisting in her head.</p><p>Her mother’s hair fell out. Silene made her scarves out of old blouses and brought her tea in the living room where she watched her game shows.</p><p>Silene cried at night, because she didn’t know how to help her mother. Rafa held her, pulled her tight in his arms and told her it would be okay. But they both knew those were just words.</p><p>Sometimes Silene wondered if her mother cried at night, too. She wished her mother had someone to hold her and tell her it was going to be okay. Maybe that’s what Silene was supposed to do. But she didn’t know how.</p><p>**</p><p>“You’re going into default,” the mortgage officer told her.</p><p>Silene nodded absently, pulling her jacket around her tightly. She watched a woman behind the counter hand a customer a wad of euros. She watched a machine spit out another wad. This place was fucking flooded with cash. Did they have to suck her dry?</p><p>**</p><p>The idea had been spinning in her head for weeks when she finally brought it up to Rafa. Silene was afraid it would sound crazy. It was crazy, after all.</p><p>“What if we robbed a bank?” she asked him. They were laying in bed, Silene’s head propped up on his sturdy shoulder.</p><p>Rafa met her eyes. He looked sad. Silene hated when he looked at her like that.</p><p>“Drug money is much easier,” was all he said at first.</p><p>Silene knew that. Everyone knew that. In the stages of desperation, a normal person tried fraud and drug trafficking before they started pulling out guns and holding up banks.</p><p>But Silene had never really been a normal person. She couldn’t shake a sense that turning to fraud or drugs would inevitably envelop her in a life of crime, drawing her down into a swamp of lies and unstable criminal connections. A single bank heist, executed correctly – it was cleaner, faster, simpler. They’d get in, they’d get out, they’d pay off the mortgage, they’d be done.</p><p>But that was hard to explain, so all she said was “It would be more of a rush.”</p><p>Rafa sighed.</p><p>**</p><p>The gun felt heavy in her hands, heavy and cold.</p><p>“Hold it out like I showed you,” Rafa said.</p><p>Silene held it out in front of her, gripping it tightly, trying not to spend too much time thinking about everything this gun meant. She aimed at the tree and pulled the trigger. There was a loud bang, and a great force seemed to push her backwards, but Silene gripped the ground with her feet and held steady.</p><p>She looked forward and saw a perfect round hole in the center of the tree.</p><p>The wind swept through the branches. It swept around Silene, too, whipping her hair across her face.</p><p>“You’re a natural,” said Rafa.</p><p>**</p><p>They spent two months planning.</p><p>In later years, Silene would be called impulsive, hotheaded, reckless. Maybe she was. Maybe those are just words we use for an angry woman who challenges a man’s plan.</p><p>Either way, that first time, Rafa told her she was overthinking it. “We’ll just go up to the counter, pull out the guns, take what they give us, and leave,” he said one afternoon, as they were sitting in Silene’s room going over the plan.</p><p>Silene just shook her head. “This has to work,” she said, meeting his eyes imploringly. “We don’t have room to make mistakes. It’s not just our lives on the line. You understand?”</p><p>Rafa just quietly pulled her against him. Silene rested her head in the crook of his neck and let out a long breath. He gripped her tightly and held her still.</p><p>He understood.</p><p>Silene squeezed him gratefully, then went back to her notes.</p><p>**</p><p>There are many ways to commit an armed robbery.</p><p>The Professor holed himself up for decades planning the perfect heist. He refined his vision, accounted for each contingency, committed himself to this as if it was an ideology. He convinced himself that he was leading a movement, a captain of some vague international resistance.</p><p>Berlin talked about crime as if it were an art form. He stole paintings from auction houses and diamonds from jewelry stores and styled himself as a gentleman, and too few people questioned it.</p><p>But armed robbery isn’t an art form, and it’s not a form of resistance, and the ability to view it as such is a privilege, or possibly a form of derangement. Silene didn’t hair any airs about what she was doing. She didn’t steal paint-spattered canvases or sparkling diamonds. She stole cold, hard cash, and she did it the old-fashioned way – with masks and guns and a getaway car. Call her uncreative, but she pulled off fifteen perfect heists that way, while Berlin’s 434 diamonds all got confiscated by the French police.</p><p>**</p><p>Robbing a bank did provide a specific kind of rush. It was something like that feeling of cycling down a hill at full speed. There was a jolt of adrenaline, a feeling of power and freedom, a rush of excitement from that incredible feeling of <em>momentum</em>. But there was also, somewhere, a faint understanding that this whole thing was completely out of her control and could end in disaster at any moment.</p><p>The shaking woman in the teal sweater handed over wads of cash from behind the counter. Silene stuffed them into a bag while Rafa covered her, shouting threats, his gun raised at the frightened bank-goers.</p><p>They drove off in an unmarked car.</p><p>They made out with twelve thousand euros in that first bank robbery. In comparison to the Professor’s heists, it was nothing. But it was more than Silene made in six months at the café, and it was enough to make all the back-payments on the mortgage.</p><p>As they drove away, Silene laughed. She laughed because if she didn’t laugh, she’d cry.</p><p>**</p><p>There was only supposed to be one robbery. Silene had only intended to have to pull a gun on an innocent person once.</p><p>But five months later, they were once again verging on default. The medical bills were piling up. Silene sighed.</p><p>**</p><p>Her mother never asked where the money was coming from. Silene went with her to the hospital and told the doctors to pursue the best course of treatment, no matter the cost, and her mother just gave her a sad look.</p><p>“I hope you’re being safe, cariño,” her mother told her, taking Silene’s hand in hers.</p><p>Silene smiled at her mother and squeezed her hand but didn’t say anything in response.</p><p>**</p><p>Silene was twenty-four when Rafa proposed to her.</p><p>She turned him down.</p><p>“What the fuck, Silene,” he vented angrily, pocketing the diamond ring and slamming a hand down on the stone wall they were standing next to. He looked out at the crashing waves of the Mediterranean, shaking his head.</p><p>Silene wished she had a better explanation for him, but she didn’t understand her answer either.</p><p>**</p><p>When Silene was twenty-six, her mother went into remission. Her hair started to grow back. She started working again, despite Silene’s insistence that she didn’t need to.</p><p>“Cariño, you don’t make enough money at the café to support us both,” her mother said, and there was that knowing look in her eyes again. There was a quiet understanding between them. It didn’t need to be talked about. It didn’t require thanks. Silene just did what she had to do, the same way her mother had when she was growing up.</p><p>Silene averted her gaze.</p><p>Twelve bank robberies in five years had netted her and Rafa €237,000.</p><p>“A banker makes that in a year,” Silene sighed to Rafa.</p><p>Rafa laughed. “A good banker makes that in a month.”</p><p>**</p><p>For the next three years, things were good. Silene and Rafa’s guns stayed in the bottom drawer of her bureau, untouched. Silene’s mother walked around the house, humming to herself. The laundry was always folded in perfect lines. They celebrated Christmas together, the three of them, with a live tree covered in angels and snowflakes, and a roasted pig, and turrón. While Silene was in the kitchen making hot chocolate for them, she heard her mother talking to Rafa.</p><p>“You take care of Silene,” she said. “Thank you for that.”</p><p>“She’s a special woman,” Rafa said.</p><p>“She’s fierce,” her mother laughed. “But I think you can handle her.”</p><p>Silene smiled to herself. She carried the steaming mugs into the living room, where her mother and Rafa were still laughing and carols were playing on the stereo. The mugs were warm, and the chocolate was sweet, and for a moment, it seemed like all in the world was good.</p><p>**</p><p>Silene got a new job as a hostess at a high-end restaurant. But she hated it, and quit after a month to go back to the café. “I felt like a prostitute,” she said bitterly when Rafa asked about it. “At the café when men stared at my ass at least I got to feel indignant.”</p><p>Rafa sang and played guitar on the weekends, and Silene went to watch him and clapped and cheered for him, and afterwards they’d kiss and she’d tell him how brilliant he was. And the wonderful thing about Rafa was that he didn’t need her to say that, so they both knew it was honest.</p><p>Rafa brought up marriage again one night when they lay in bed together. Silene nestled into his neck and for the first time in her life the idea of being committed for life to something – anything – didn’t feel scary.</p><p>**</p><p>But then the cancer came back.</p><p>**</p><p>The thirteenth heist was a takeover of an armored van. They left the driver and the guard tied up in the back of the van and drove away with €130,000; their biggest ever haul.</p><p>As they unloaded the money in the old trailer where they kept their heist supplies, Rafa suddenly seemed to pause. He sat down on the mattress in the corner.</p><p>“How long are we going to keep doing this?” he asked tiredly.</p><p>Silene stiffened, continuing to stack the money. “As long as we have to.”</p><p>**</p><p>But she’d lied. The money from the thirteenth heist was enough to get them by for years. And yet, four months later, when Silene’s mother hadn’t improved, and the doctors said things “didn’t look good,” Silene impulsively grabbed her gun from the drawer and ran. Rafa chased after her, but he wasn’t able to talk her down from marching into the royal credit union and resting the tip of her gun on the neck of the guard standing by the door.</p><p>“Give us all your money!” she yelled, a desperate hint of mania in her voice. “Or I shoot!”</p><p>As they drove away, Rafa looked over at her, and he didn’t say anything.</p><p>**</p><p>Rafa had talked about marriage, he’d talked about kids, even, and as much as it had scared Silene, the distant look in his eyes these days scared her far more.</p><p>But the winds that blew Silene were more powerful than she could control. She needed the rush, the fear, the exhilarating sense of unbridled, unstoppable forces in motion.</p><p>“This isn’t healthy,” Rafa told her as she laid out a plan for their fifteenth heist. They were sitting on the beach in midwinter, the wind off the ocean whipping their hair and crawling under their jackets.</p><p>“We need the money,” Silene said, but they both knew that was a lie. They had over a hundred thousand euros hidden away, stuffed under mattresses and in bureaus and in old hat boxes.</p><p>He looked away. “There are therapists who do grief counseling, you know,” he said eventually, his voice quiet.</p><p>“What, you think I’m crazy?” Silene snapped, knowing full well how unfair her accusation was.</p><p>He met her eyes. “I think you’re scared.”</p><p>“You think I’m scared?” Silene asked, feeling herself heating with anger. “And I guess it would be nice for you if I wasn’t so scared, no? If I could just settle down and let my mother die like a normal girlfriend so you wouldn’t have to deal with all of my mess?”</p><p>“Silene –”</p><p>“Then you could have your fucking wedding and we could move into some tiny, shit little house like a normal couple and it would all be just fucking perfect, wouldn’t it? Is that what you want? Some nice girl who’s just going to let life happen around her?”</p><p>“<em>Silene</em>.”</p><p>“<em>This is me</em>, Rafa. This – these heists – <em>this is who I am,” </em>Silene said forcefully.</p><p>“I know, Silene.” His voice was sad. Silene hated that.</p><p>She breathed. “This is me,” she said again, her voice cracking slightly under the weight of her own words.</p><p>“I know.”</p><p>Silene felt tears starting to fall down her face, hot against her cool skin. “This is me,” she whispered through the tears, and Rafa sighed and pulled her close.</p><p>**</p><p>The fifteenth heist nearly ended in disaster.</p><p>There was an armed cop in the bank who happened to be there making a deposit. He pulled out his gun and fired at them.</p><p>If Silene hadn’t been wearing a bulletproof vest under her sweatshirt, she would have been killed.</p><p>Maybe that’s what she wanted.</p><p>Maybe it wasn’t.</p><p>Either way, Rafa pulled her, and they ran. They only got two thousand euro from the woman behind the counter before the bullets had started flying.</p><p>As they drove away, Rafa finally unloaded on her.</p><p>“<em>Never again</em>,” he said in a voice that was harsh and angry and had a note of finality in it. “Hear me, Silene? <em>Never again</em>. That was <em>it</em>, that was the <em>last one</em>.”</p><p>Silene was silent.</p><p>He looked at her. “<em>Answer me</em>, Silene!” he yelled. “<em>Fucking respond!</em>”</p><p>Silene couldn’t meet his eyes. “One more,” she whispered. “Just one more.”</p><p>She didn’t know why she needed one more. They could have stopped at fifteen. They could have stopped at thirteen. Hell, they could have just defaulted on the house and trusted government healthcare and scraped by, the same way millions of people do each year.</p><p>Rafa looked at her heavily. He closed his eyes briefly, and Silene felt him slipping away from her.</p><p>But then he cursed, and sighed. “One more.”</p><p>**</p><p>The sixteenth heist was a perfect, clean operation. The guard was exactly where they expected him to be. Rafa disarmed him in seconds. The bank-goers got down on the ground. There was no resistance. The man behind the counter handed over the money quickly and without hesitation.</p><p>They ran out of the bank with two duffel bags of cash, and were halfway to the car when the police pulled up and began shooting.</p><p>Cops yelled. Bullets flew. Rafa ran. Silene fired. People screamed. Shots rang. A body fell to the pavement.</p><p>It all happened in a matter of seconds.</p><p>You think, that when something like that happens, that time will stop. That the air will hang, still. That you will have the luxury of watching, in horror, as the body falls, as the blood pools around its head, dark and thick and red, as the love of your life dies right before your eyes.</p><p>But time stops for neither pleasure nor pain.</p><p>There was only the thump in her ear, mixed in with the shouts, the blood out of the corner of her eye, mixed in with the flying bullets, a glance of unseeing eyes behind her as she ran, firing desperately.</p><p>Everything spun.</p><p>Silene ran. She ran, and ran, and ran. The wind whipped around her face, tugging at her hair, whistling through her clothes. Her feet carried her blindly. She couldn’t feel her legs, she couldn’t feel her body, she couldn’t feel anything except the cracking, gnawing sensation in her chest. She didn’t have a destination – for all she knew, she would run like this until she fell, finished, onto the pavement herself, and her own blood soaked into the sidewalk around her.</p><p>That would seem like a fair ending for her.</p><p>Eventually, she did fall, but not in the way she wanted to. She simply tripped, stumbled on a crack in the pavement and went flying. And to her great consternation, she instinctively put her hands out to shield her landing, preventing her head from cracking on the sidewalk. She was left with only scraped up hands and knees.</p><p>Nonetheless, Silene sat there for an hour, on a cold, darkening, narrow street, with her head buried in her knees, crying. And when the tears finally dried up, she was met with only silence, and stillness, and images that wouldn’t leave her head.</p><p>It took a week for the cuts on her palms to heal, but the blood on her hands lingered.</p><p>**</p><p>Palermo lost the love of his life, and it made him an asshole. It made him bitter and angry. It made him hide his pain behind a shell of indifference – he wore cruelty like a bulletproof vest, using people, <em>hurting</em> people, all in the name of running from his pain.</p><p>And yet, we love him. We find it in our hearts to offer him affection, sympathy, and compassion, or at the very least pity. For in the sincerity of a man’s love, he is able to find redemption. When he pines for the one he lost, we hope beyond hope that he will be forgiven. When he cries for the one he drove away, we root for him. A man’s love – genuine, heartfelt, and pure – will outweigh a multitude of sins in our eyes.</p><p>But love doesn’t redeem women. A woman driven bitter by loss and pain is just that – bitter. A woman who uses people because she’s hurt and confused receives our contempt, not our compassion.</p><p>No one wanted to heal Silene’s poor, broken heart. No one even seemed to notice that she was broken.</p><p>**</p><p>Rio was young. He’d never held a gun before he arrived in Toledo, and it showed – he fumbled with the weapons, they looked bulky and out of place in his arms.</p><p>But he was earnest and good-hearted, and he looked at Silene like she was the most amazing woman on the planet. And when you’ve just lost everything, there’s something wonderfully comforting in the safety of adoration. Maybe Silene thought that his youthful shine would rub off on her. Maybe she was using sex as a release. Maybe they were soulmates. Maybe it just felt good to be held at night.</p><p>She traced Rio’s face at night while she curled up in his arms. He grinned at her with that big, full-bodied grin of his, that wonderful, dimpled grin that knew nothing of heartbreak and pain.</p><p>“When we have our island,” he told her in a low voice, “We’ll have a bedroom that looks right out at the ocean. With windows on all sides, so that it feels like we’re floating in the middle of the sea. And we’ll be the only ones for miles, so we can be as loud as we want.”</p><p>Silene closed her eyes, indulging in the fantasy of warm waters and tropical breezes and a handsome boy who was endlessly devoted to her.</p><p>But then inevitably, the images flashed before her eyes. The thump of the body. The red of the blood. The unseeing eyes.</p><p>“And what will we do all day on our island?” she asked him, trying to return to the fantasy.</p><p>“I’ll fix up the house,” he told her, blissfully unaware of the things she carried. “I’ll build you a treehouse, and a garden, and grand staircase that you can walk down every morning like a princess. And you can sing to the birds and make key lime pies.”</p><p>Silene snorted softly, trailing her fingertips along his chest. “You won’t want to eat my pies.”</p><p>Rio grinned again. “Well,” he murmured, “we can just have sex, then.”</p><p>Silene snuggled into him, wrapping her arms around his neck and resting her heard against his chest. His heart beat in her ear, and it comforted her.</p><p>“That works,” she told him.</p><p>**</p><p>Silene had never really had female friends. When she was little, the other girls just didn’t want to play the same way she did. She fit in better with the boys, and their rough-and-tumble games. Then she got older, and the girls did that thing girls do where they decide you’re different, and so they form tight-knit groups that don’t include you. Then she met Rafa, and between him, and her mother, and work, and planning sixteen bank heists, she’d just never really had space for other friends.</p><p>So she wasn’t initially sure how to approach Nairobi.</p><p>They eyed each other warily across the table, sizing each other up. Nairobi seemed fun – she laughed a lot, and teased all the others as if she’d known them for years – but Silene could sense immediately that Nairobi wasn’t like Rio. There was pain hidden in her eyes. It formed an invisible wall around her, the way pain so often does. She held secrets and regrets, just like Silene, and she held them close to her chest, afraid to share, afraid to trust, but simultaneously longing to be opened up. Like Silene, she had a wall that said, “You don’t actually know me until you know my full story.”</p><p>Silene decided she wanted to know Nairobi’s full story.</p><p>**</p><p>When the Professor told her that her mother had died, her chest balled up and her throat went dry, but she didn’t cry.</p><p>She wondered, passingly, if she had already used up all of her tears.</p><p>Of course, they came eventually. Once she stopped moving it caught up with her, the same way it always did. She collapsed. Rio held her.</p><p>His arms weren’t the arms she’d expected to be holding her when this moment finally came. And truthfully, they were a poor substitute for the arms that ought to have been holding her – the arms that had held her since the beginning, the arms that knew her full story.</p><p>No one knew Silene’s full story anymore.</p><p>**</p><p>They called her impulsive.</p><p>Impulsive is sleeping with the police inspector investigating you. Impulsive is leaving a two billion euro heist with its wheels spinning because you have a date. Impulsive is punching a police officer when you also happen to secretly be the most wanted man in Spain.</p><p>They called her selfish.</p><p>Selfish is kicking your lover out of bed because you’re too wounded to deal with the potential for feeling something. Selfish is beating up a man who has been bound and handcuffed, and then claiming to have done it in a woman’s defense. Selfish is unleashing a trained killer on your teammates because your ego is so fragile that you’d rather have chaos and death than not be in charge.</p><p>They called her reckless.</p><p>Reckless is ordering an execution in what was meant to be a bloodless heist. Reckless is tossing an angry teammate to the police, with no idea of who she’ll talk to or what she’ll say, and letting those chips fall where they may. Reckless is intimidating a frightened woman into sleeping with you, then deciding, on a whim, to whisk her away and marry her. Reckless is mutilating a man in a hotel bathroom.</p><p>So maybe Silene was all of those things. But let’s not forget that she was also loving, and loyal, and fierce. That she did what she had to do for those she loved. That she took the pain she was given, and she bore it as well as she could. That she helped others open up. That she listened, and loved, and comforted. That she stayed by the bedside. That she ran into the fire. That she always held on. That she believed. That she <em>cared</em>.</p><p>Silene knew that if she ever stopped moving, the guilt would eat her alive. So she pushed forward, hopping from stone to stone as one by one, the people around her fell.</p><p>Rafa was first.</p><p>Then her mother.</p><p>Then Moscow.</p><p>Then Rio.</p><p>Then Nairobi.</p><p>One by one, they loved her, they cared for her, they let her in – she let <em>them </em>in – and one by one, they fell like birds that had been shot from the sky.</p><p>**</p><p>The air was still in the monastery – clear and echoing in the daytime, heavy and silent at night, but always, always still.</p><p>But there was a belltower, and it overlooked a great ravine, and up there, the winds were constant.</p><p>Silene wasn’t sleeping much those days, so she went up there often, in the early hours of the morning, to watch the sun rise over the ravine.</p><p>She stood, and watched the midnight blue turned to dusky purple, and then rose, and then gold, before finally a clear, bright blue emerged. And meanwhile the wind whipped her face, making the leaves dance and the grass ripple and the clouds fly.</p><p>Silene didn’t know why, but it made her smile.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>Comments aren't required, but they certainly make my day :)</p></blockquote></div></div>
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